so Derek told me three times. on the phone. over text at midnight. at this bar where i was watching march madness and not paying attention. he kept saying the rules are different at every company and i kept going yeah yeah. bought him a beer as thanks for the warning. did not actually follow the warning. classic.
round one of me finding this out the hard way. Wednesday night. kitchen counter. my pad thai was cold, the takeout box was leaking onto a paper towel, laptop open to the Amazon candidate portal. failure to adhere to these guidelines may result in disqualification from the recruitment process. no AI tools. hold on. FORTY EIGHT HOURS before this i was in a Meta coding round. GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet loaded into CoderPad. interviewer said go ahead. they graded me on prompting. i left that building thinking cool, this is just normal now. Amazon said nah, disqualified. my girlfriend came over, thought my app got rejected, i tried explaining that Meta rewards the thing Amazon bans you for. she thought i was lying lol.
Derek had it worse. Goldman Sachs february. HireVue. thirty second prep. two minute caps. no ChatGPT no Google. he said he barely read the prompts before time ran out. voice cracked telling me that, sorry Derek lol. Coinbase two weeks after Goldman, interviewer goes use whatever you want, all rounds open to AI. Blind backed that up. Derek called it training for swimming and showing up to a track race. accurate.
WHERE IS THE LIST. that was my first thought. which companies allow AI, which ban it. i googled for two hours. results? two paragraphs about Meta, nine hundred words on ethics. garbage. so i built my own. policy pages. recruiter emails from Blind. reddit threads, glassdoor 2025 and 2026, three recruiter friends i texted until they cracked.
Meta launched their AI coding round october 2025. sixty minutes. CoderPad panel with GPT-5 Claude Sonnet 4 Gemini 2.5 Pro Llama 4 Maverick loaded up. replaces one of two onsite rounds. i sat there ten seconds before touching anything. Marcus had Shopify january, even wilder, bring your own IDE, bring your own AI, pair programming. tacos near his office, he said you could spot who had copilot instantly. speed gap was quote embarrassing. Rippling allows AI too, adjusts rubric by track. Duolingo one experimental round, bans it everywhere else. 67 percent of startups use AI in interviews per some survey. of course.
Amazon, full disqualification. recruiter friend said the clause went in late 2025, her exact words "internal guidelines call it an unfair advantage." Goldman, the two minute timer handles it. you cannot tab out, prompt something, read output, and answer in 120 seconds. format IS the policy. Derek found out.
ANTHROPIC. may 2025. told applicants do not use AI assistants during the application process. they. make. Claude. word for word lol. twitter tore them apart for a week. by july walked it back, AI fine for resumes, interviews banned unless interviewer says otherwise. 61 and a half billion dollar company. policy lasted sixty days. i tell that every time someone asks me if the rules are settled. not close.
Google no ban, in person pilots october 2025, good luck with an overlay when your interviewer is three feet away eating a sandwich. Apple Netflix Microsoft nothing public, varies by team, sometimes by interviewer. drove me CRAZY during prep. you cannot plan for that.
what i do now, stupid simple. notes doc on my phone. every company gets their AI policy pasted before i touch anything. would have saved Derek at Goldman. allow companies need reps reading AI output fast and choosing what to keep, totally different skill from writing code. i was bad at it during Meta, slow, it showed. ban companies the opposite, no tool in browser, nothing in proctoring, zero traces.
nine interviews on InterviewMan both sides now. allow side adds audio and screen reading on top of whatever AI the company gives you. ban side runs desktop overlay, invisible on screen share, out of dock, out of Activity Monitor, not in process lists, blocks WebRTC, process name masked mac and windows. 57000 users, twenty something stealth features, twelve bucks a month annual. i searched reddit discord chrome web store trustpilot for one person out of 57000 who got caught. nobody.
Meta Shopify keep leaning into AI harder. Goldman Amazon locked on bans. Derek and i got gas station coffee last week, tasted like battery acid honestly why did we even buy it, and his take was candidates are playing two different sports in the same season. i do not see that changing and at this point i have stopped expecting it to.
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